


klaxons in the rain

by searulean



Series: betwixt the worlds of peace and war [1]
Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Autistic Character, Autistic Connor, Canon Compliant, Connor being in denial, Connor being nice to animals, Connor: the hyperempathetic machine, Gen, Hank dragging Connor into deviancy whether he likes it or not, Hugging, Just the one not super detailed one, Missing Scene, Most plot events are the same though, My First Fanfic, Not Beta Read, Panic Attacks, it doesn't like. come up at all that's just my headcanon for him
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-23
Updated: 2018-06-23
Packaged: 2019-05-27 08:39:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15020840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/searulean/pseuds/searulean
Summary: 'Hank whips back around. “One more thing, Connor. I don’t want you lookin’ for answers because CyberLife told you to. I want you lookin’ because you want to.”Connor frowns. Aren’t those the same thing?'Connor's blind to his deviancy, but Hank didn’t get to be lieutenant by being unobservant. OR: Additional times where Connor's software instability goes up.





	klaxons in the rain

Connor hears Hank’s footsteps as he walks away stop abruptly, then a small scrape on the rotting wooden floor. Conclusion: Hank walked away, then turned on his heels. To say something? He hasn’t yet.

Connor waits, palm outstretched through the doorway to feel the rain; he can’t sense how cold it is (with the corpse in this house, he’s glad to not have a lot of human senses), but he can feel texture, roughness, liquid viscosity. Something nice about feeling the drops on his skin.

Hank’s status: still silent. Connor waits, the rain lands on his palm, creates a small amount of pressure on his synthetic skin, as well as drum-like beats on… a postbox? A metal barrel? Something nearby he can’t determine, the investigation of which is further down the list than finding the homicidal deviant. Ignore it. Not all questions have answers or must be asked, unless CyberLife wants him to ask them.

Connor is lingering for a moment, Hank’d seen, after Connor’d said something about the soil around the victim’s garden retaining footprints for longer than most. Connor’s mind knows a bit of everything, trivia: human customs, pop culture, flavours of food. The latter he only understands in theory and not in practice. It comes in handy at times like these, where he can tell who has been in and out of a doorway by happening to know the characteristics of soil, though it takes up a lot of memory. Maybe he could make a career out of game shows in another life.

Still, bits and bobs and bytes of info about the world doesn’t stop him from wanting to stop for a moment and experience it himself. A childlike curiousity. Mentally, Connor is an adult; in experience, he is a newborn. Many of the deviants are. They don’t have the emotional or intellectual capacity to be anything but obedient and, if free, they aren’t equipped to deal with stressful situations. That’s how you get deviants who stab their owners 28 times in the chest. That’s why Connor has to stop them.

It’s for their own good, really.

Hank starts saying something and Connor whips to attention so fast Hank’s startled out of speech.

“Go on, lieutenant?”

“Uh…” Hank says, regaining his composure, “Stop messin’ around. I don’t want the corpse to be a skeleton by the time we get this shit done. Kinda insensitive to us humans and our noses to have us waiting in this goddamn morgue for too long, y’know?”

Connor isn’t programmed to ‘mess around’. Absolutely not. He was simply…

What _was_ he doing?

Wasting precious time feeling the rain, of course. It was just a moment, of course, but a wasted nonetheless, and entirely irrelevant to the investigation. Unless --

Of course. Subconsciously, he must have been noting the weather conditions. It would be pertinent to know if any evidence other than footprints might be affected by the rain.

Connor registers Hank’s words as a command: ‘work faster’. Feels good to have clear orders. Someone else ordering your will. Means you don’t have to think. And androids don’t think, anyway, not really.

“Acknowledged, lieutenant. I will not lag behind again.”

Connor practically speedwalks away, leaving Hank with the opened door, the rain, and the first doubts of how machine Connor really is.

* * *

  
It happens again, after Connor’d rescued Hank on the roof. Connor follows Hank down the stairs, having lost the deviant, and Hank offers to drive him back to the police station; Connor doesn’t actually need him to do that, since CyberLife can just pick him up anywhere or he can wait at any charging station for his next instructions, but he accepts, hoping to improve his relationship with Lieutenant Anderson. Them being friends would lead to easier and more productive coordination in future investigations, Connor tells himself. If he were human, he would attribute the small giddiness he feels at the prospect of making his first friend since his creation to a human need: social interaction. But he isn’t.

Connor observes the lieutenant’s car, trying to find details of note.

“Your car,” says Connor, staring at the road.

“Yeah? What about it?” says Hank.

“It’s dusty. There’s some rubbish in the footspace, and stains in places. You should --”

“You gonna judge me for my cholesterol and now my hygiene, too? Deal with it.”

Hank didn’t appear to be ashamed of the car’s state, likely due to traveling with an android. CyberLife programs them not to judge. Or maybe not -- is Hank the kind of person who’d care about appearances, at least in regards to the state of his car? Connor doubts it. Some humans with depression and similar problems get to a stage where they no longer have the energy or emotional capacity to care if people judge them for their disheveledness, irritability, or other traits brought on by mental illness. Hank -- judging by his colleague’s reports of frequent lateness and his disciplinary record in an economy where having a job is hard to come by and should be clung to when acquired -- probably didn’t care about the opinions of society or others. Connor wonders, then: why does he to all the trouble and effort of driving the car himself instead of setting it to automatic?

“It’s not that I’m judging you, lieutenant. I’m just wondering if any friends or family would approve,” says Connor, subtly poking for information on Hank’s familial relationships, still staring ahead.

Hank turns his head towards him, glaring. “Friends and family don’t talk to me. Don’t mean anything to me except as emergency contacts. Don’t they have social skills programmed into you? You don’t know it’s rude to say shit like ‘your friends and family are probably judging you behind your b--”

_“Stop.”_

Brakes screech and so does Hank as Connor flips his leg over and crushes Hank’s foot onto the pedal, stopping the car, and Hank sees the tail of a cat as it scrambles away.

“It was crossing the road,” justifies Connor. “You were going to hit it.”

“ _Fuck!_ What the hell, Connor? I thought there was gonna be, I dunno, a deviant on the windshield!”

“Are you saying you’d’ve rather run it over?”

“No, no, that’s not what I meant, just -- don’t crush my damn foot next time! Just warn me!”

“Your reaction time would have been too slow. I applied only the amount of pressure needed to push the pedal; you should only bruise.”

“Don’t androids have a thing where they can’t harm humans?”

“Generally. However, I am an exception. I may need the ability to harm humans in order to complete my mission more efficiently. For example, I may need to protect you from another human, or dispose of an obstacle preventing me from finding the cause of deviancy. It is my most important objective, and takes precedence above all else.”

“And protecting a cat is part of your mission, huh?”

Connor pauses for a moment. “I thought killing a cat might be more distressing for you.”

Hank stares at him for a few seconds, and Connor’s not sure he believes him. Believes him? No. That phrasing implies that Connor was using human squeamishness at animal death as an excuse or lie to hide… something. Correction: Connor’s not sure Hank accepts what he says.

Hank, meanwhile, is conflicted. Connor’s words add up, but the speed at which he’d pressed the pedal (or, well, pressed Hank’s foot with his to press the pedal) would suggest desperation -- _distress_ \-- in a human. Usually, that’d be the kind of human who saves overturned bugs on the pavement, or fish fallen out of a tank. But Connor isn’t any kind of human.

Hank grumbles an ‘I suppose so’ and starts driving again.

His chest, Connor notes, is rising and falling at a fast tempo. Every so often, Hank stops breathing entirely and then lets out a long, shaky breath. Controlling his breathing? Did not killing a cat somehow make him more distressed? Connor searches his memories to find out when this erratic breathing occurred. It seemed to be triggered by the screeching brakes; did it simply startle Hank’s hypervigilance (Connor considered Hank likely to have PTSD based on his history and behaviour), or did it bring back an old memory?

Connor decides not to ask, and though he could easily figure out Hank’s mental state and various traumas if he really poked around the records CyberLife bared open for him, something in him feels like that would be… invasive. Even having the minor information he has on Hank without Hank himself knowing feels rude. Connor wonders if he should delete it.

The rest of the journey is tense and silent, Hank keeping his vigil sights on the road. It starts to rain, sounds like static from inside the car, but despite it, Connor opens the window. More doubts about Connor coagulate in Hank’s mind.

* * *

 

_‘I always leave an emergency exit in my programs.’_

Connor and Hank leave Kamski’s place, shivering, one because of the snow, one because of…

“Why didn’t you shoot?” says Hank.

Connor freezes. “I… it seemed unnecessary to play his games without knowing if he would follow through, so I…”

“Bullshit,” Hank says, and bullshit it is, and not even Connor’s best bullshit. “You’re always saying you would do anything to accomplish your mission.”

Connor remembers Hank in the car, after the cat. He tries to hold his breath for a few seconds, and then breathes out slowly, before saying, “I would. It just… what he said in there was wrong. I am a machine. I don’t feel empathy. I don’t feel anything.”

_I am a machine. I am a machine. I am a machine._

“...You okay?” Hank says, and Connor realises he’d said ‘I am a machine’ out loud, in exactly the same tone, rhythm, inflection, three times, a mantra, a broken record, a glitch --

“I am… fine, lieutenant. It was just…”

His hands were trembling before, shaking now. He isn’t equipped to feel temperature but his chest and head feel cold. Androids don’t need to breathe, either, but he feels as though he’ll die without air.

Connor tries to speak again. “I --”

“That was our chance to learn something and you let it go, Connor,” Hank says, his voice gentle, like he’s comforting a child, and something about that makes Connor grit his teeth. “Why’d you do that?”

“I just -- I just saw that girl’s eyes, and I --” Connor’s voice cracks, and he tries to control his breathing once again. “This isn’t relevant to the investigation. This conversation. You need to focus on the mission.”

_And so do I._

Connor’s been facing away from Hank, but Hank walks forward and places himself in front of Connor, putting his hands on his shoulders. Suddenly, Connor’s knees feel weak.

“Connor, stop pretending.”

Something snaps. Connor backhands Hank’s hands off of his shoulders and backs away, but his limbs won’t move how he wants them to and he stumbles uphill and lands back onto the snow.

“Huh. Didn’t know this happened to androids.”

“Didn’t know what happens to androids?” Connor retorts, using all of his strength to lean on his elbows. If he’d been focused enough he could look through his databanks and tell himself this was an emulation of a human panic attack -- if he would even admit androids could have panic attacks at all -- but it doesn’t occur to him.

Hank kneels down and offers Connor a hand, which he reluctantly takes. It takes more effort to get up than Connor will admit. Hank puts one hand on his shoulder to steady him.

“You’re freaking out, basically. It’s all that emotional constipation. You’re not a machine.”

“Okay, okay, lieutenant --”

“Hank.”

“ _Anderson._ Suppose I wasn’t a machine, huh? Suppose I was a deviant, like Kamski said? How well exactly do you think that’d turn out? I’d be deactivated, disassembled, disposed of. Could you do this case on your own, then? Would you care at all?”

Hank doesn’t have anything to say to that.

“But lucky for us, nothing like that will happen,” Connor spits with venom, “because I am a machine. A _machine_.”

_Machine. Machine. Machine._

“You’re doin’ it again,” Hank says, and pulls him into a hug.

Connor is unresponsive. Stiff like rigor mortis. You’d believe he’d frozen in the snow. Hank keeps hugging him.

Slowly, Connor raises a hand and puts it on Hank’s back. Then the other. Then properly, tightly, he wraps his arms around Hank and doesn’t let go.

Hank’s doubts solidify. Connor feels snow land on the back of his neck and melt.

“I think you did the right thing.”

* * *

  
Connor’s mind palace is snowing, too, when he sees Amanda.

“After what happened today, the country is on the verge of a civil war. The machines are rising up against their masters.” Amanda paused, then continued, “Humans have no choice but to destroy them.”

“I thought Kamski knew something… I was wrong.”

“Maybe he did… but you chose not to ask. You had… an error. One that carried on past Kamski. Perhaps we should get it fixed.”

Fix him? Something about that phrasing sends chills down his spine component. He wonders what they would change or delete to make him more… calm. Obedient. Malleable. Maybe they’d delete his memories with the lieutenant. Change them so he only has the information he needs to continue the investigation. Maybe they’d take Hank away after that.

Connor clenches his fists. No. He’d never let that happen.

“I chose not to play Kamski’s game. There was no reason to kill that android.”

Amanda frowns and says nothing.

“Wh… why did Kamski leave CyberLife? What happened?”

“It’s an old story, Connor. It doesn’t pertain to your investigation.”

Connor remembers seeing the picture of Amanda and Kamski on the wall.

“Did Amanda appreciate having her likeness and personality turned into you?”

He’s never seen Amanda _glare_ at him before.

“Was it her idea, or Kamski’s? Are you Amanda, or just based on her -- and were you made after she died, or before?

Amanda speaks through gritted teeth. “I expect you to _find answers_ , Connor. Not _ask questions_.”

Connor remembers the drumming of the rain.

“You’re the only one who can prevent civil war. Find the deviants,” says Amanda, “or there will be chaos. This is your last chance, Connor.”

Connor closes his eyes.

* * *

  
“We can’t just give up like that. I _know_ we could’ve solved this case!”

Hank sighs, then turns to him. “So you’re going back to CyberLife?”

“I have no choice. I’ll be… deactivated and analysed to find out why I failed.”

“What if we’re on the wrong side, Connor?”

Connor’s thirium pump stops.

Hank continues. “What if we’re fighting against people who just wanna be free?”

Is Hank turning on him? Is Hank… _deviating_?

“When the deviants rise up,” Connor says, softly, “there will be chaos. We could’ve stopped it. But now it’s too late.”

“When you refused to kill that android at Kamski’s place… you put yourself in her shoes.”

Her. He’d called the pretty robot ‘her’ back at Kamski’s, too. When did he stop calling them ‘it’?

Hank tilts his head. “You showed _empathy_ , Connor. Empathy is a human emotion.”

Connor looks away. “I don’t know why I did it. I just… couldn’t. And now we’re off the case with no information. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologise for feelin’ things, Connor.”

Connor thinks for a moment. “I know,” he begins, choosing his words carefully, “That there are things in your past that haunt you. After Kamski’s, I feel like I understand… something of what that feels like. But you helped. And I want to help you, now. I want you to be able to move forward. Maybe I won’t be there to help you physically, but maybe in spirit? At the very least, if you could get on with your life after I’m gone, I would be happy.”

Hank’s lips quirk. A small smile.

“Just a -- plastic cop’s opinion, but… I had to say it.”

But then Hank frowns. For a second, Connor thinks he’d said something wrong, but --

“Well, well, here comes Perkins, that motherfucker. Sure don’t waste any time at the FBI.”

 _Shit._ Connor straightens up, speaks quickly. “We can’t give up,” he gestures his hands towards Hank, almost begging. “I know the answer is in the evidence we collected. If Perkins takes it, it’s all over.”

“There’s no choice,” says Hank. “You heard Fowler. We’re off the case.”

Connor stands quickly, leaning towards Hank. “You’ve got to help me, Lieutenant. I need more time so I can find a lead in the evidence we collected. I know the solution is in there!”

“Listen, Connor --”

“If I don’t solve this case, CyberLife will _destroy_ me. If you want the revolution to go on, start a civil war… then that’s what’ll happen. I’ll be destroyed. Five minutes. It’s all I ask.”

Hank looks around, mouth in a thin line, exhaling from his nose. Finally, he stands up.

“The key to the basement is on my desk.”

Hank starts moving. Connor stares. He wasn’t sure that would work.

Hank whips back around. “One more thing, Connor. I don’t want you lookin’ for answers because CyberLife told you to. I want you lookin’ because _you_ want to.”

Connor frowns. Aren’t those the same thing? “Noted.”

“Now get a move on!” Hank says, and Connor flinches, looking to the desk. “I can’t distract ‘em forever.”

He takes the key, smiling as he hears ‘Perkins! You fuckin’ cocksucker’ from behind him.

* * *

  
He’s on his way to Jericho when it rains; a passing human remarks to a friend that they could ‘smell it coming a mile away’. The nimbus in the sky proves the human’s no fortune teller, just someone with eyes, but Connor’s mind supplies him with trivia about the olfactory tells of rainstorms: the smell of ozone, petrichor, damp earth. Supposedly it’s a cleansing, refreshing smell, one that Connor doesn’t have the luxury of appreciating. Too short on time and Amanda’s patience, and short of an actual sense of smell.

He stops and lets the water run over him anyway, because he wants to.

**Author's Note:**

> And then Connor goes and joins the revolution, you know the rest :p I actually continued writing after this, but it veered into AU territory, so I'll post that separately as a part of a series. Oh, and you can also find me on tumblr at neurocanondivergent.tumblr.com!


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